MOSCOW — As Russians expected, Vladimir Putin was the projected winner with a whopping first round victory in Sunday’s presidential elections, apparently moving the usually impassive strongman to tears.

With half of ballots counted, Putin had an unassailable lead with 64 per cent of the vote according to election officials, confirming the exit polls and putting him far ahead of four other candidates for the presidency, including Communist Gennady Zyuganov, who had less than 20 per cent of the vote. Vote counting was taking place at a furious pace compared to previous presidential elections and may mostly be completed within hours.

Putin appeared outside the red brick walls of the Kremlin late Sunday with tears in his eyes to thank thousands of supporters.

“We have won. We have gained a clean victory,” he said in an obvious reference to opposition claims of vote fraud that had been made earlier Sunday and in the days before the ballot. “We won. Glory to Russia.”

Standing above an underground shopping centre and not far from where many Soviet cosmonauts are buried, Putin described the elections as a test of Russia’s maturity that voters had passed.

But Sunday’s balloting appeared to confirm deep political fissures in the country that could spell grave trouble for the former president, current prime minister and future president.

Hundreds of thousands of well-educated middle class Muscovites as well as many residents of St. Petersburg strongly repudiated Putin on Sunday while an even larger majority of Russians living in the Urals, Siberia and the Caucasus have handed the former KGB agent who since 2000 has led Russia as president and prime minister another six years in power.

Pointing to the heaviest police presence in many years on the streets of Moscow on Sunday, as well as alleged irregularities at many polls, increasingly confident opponents of Putin condemned Sunday’s ballot as a farce. They vowed to keep up the pressure on Putin beginning on Monday by launching the first of what they claim will be many protests along the main thoroughfare leading to Red Square. The nationalist anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny said he was organizing an unauthorized march on the Kremlin on Monday. To try to force change, he also advocated a permanent tent presence of protesters similar to those of the Occupy movement in Europe and North America.

Backers of Putin have promised counter-demonstrations. But if recent experience is anything to go on, compared to opposition gatherings Putin’s rallies have largely been devoid of passion and have the look and the feel of staged events.

Competing demonstrations set up the potential for conflict. That possibility was underscored by the presence Sunday of several dozen buses and trucks loaded with police parked on just one street in the centre of Moscow. Similar groups of security forces were reported to be waiting in several other nearby places.

One of the problems for the opposition is that while it is unified in its opposition to Putin, it agrees on little else. Another is that whatever voting irregularities there may have been, Putin clearly continues to have huge backing outside Moscow, so the election is an expression of the democratic will of the people.

Among Putin’s challenges is that the capital’s political and cultural elite have it in for him. These voters have long had a disproportionate say in the running of Russia and the Soviet Union. They also live where most of the country’s immense wealth is concentrated.

Sunday’s ballot presents a number of ironies. Muscovites have unquestionably benefited the most from Russia’s oil and gas-soaked economy during Putin’s tenure, yet they are the ones who have loudly condemned the president-elect and his inner circle for grabbing a large share of the country’s economy for themselves and for not having completed meaningful economic and legal reforms to prevent what they have not been shy about calling thievery and banditism.

On the other hand, the hinterlands, which produce all of Russia’s energy wealth, have only received a tiny share of the lucre generated by almost record high prices for oil and gas. Yet voters in these distant regions still clearly admire and respect Putin.

“There are two Russias. Moscow and St. Petersburg think different than all the other regions in the country,” said Elena Istomina, who served in the regional parliament in the 1990s and was at Moscow Polling Station 174 Sunday as an observer for Mikhail Prokhorov, a billionaire who was runner-up to Putin in the capital but fared poorly elsewhere. “Those who voted for Putin are not thinking scientifically. They are uneducated. They have a Byzantine mentality. They do not think of tomorrow.”

Pensioner Marina Prostyakova, who taught Russian literature for 57 years and retained vivid memories of the extreme privations during what Russians call the Great War, took great exception to such comments as well as the behaviour of those who opposed Putin.

“The majority of the population will vote for Putin,” she said with confidence. “He is trusted. He did a lot of useful things. There is stability. We have good relations with other countries. As a teacher, I can say that he did a lot for the development of education.

“I am not supporting people who protest. One cannot please everybody and there will be always reasons to protest. But it is not easy to have responsibility for such a huge country. It is a burden. Even to establish order in a classroom is sometimes really difficult, let alone a country like Russia. I wish Putin good health and self-control.”

“A lot of our people are especially afraid of repeating the period of the early 1990s when there was hyper-inflation and no bread or milk,” said Andrei Rayskiy, a law student who described himself as a political activist. “They say they vote for Putin because they want stability, but they are really voting for stagnation. There is no connection between Putin and Moscow’s prosperity. He has not been blamed for the corruption but it has been the KGB-FSB that has gained power. It has not been a democratic regime at all.”

Putin is far too set in his ways to affect meaningful change now, despite a strong new mandate, Dmitri Tokoun said after voting for Prokhorov.

“Making reforms is not in his nature. You cannot expect that he will jump four miles,” said Tokoun, who has two doctorates and speaks French and English well.

Despite the current anger of the protesters, Tokoun said the best approach would be for the opposition to use Putin’s new six-year term to prepare "other perspectives" to convince voters elsewhere to join those in Moscow in rejecting the status quo.

“If life doesn’t change, and it will not change, we must do a better job of explaining the options,” he said.

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